Wednesday, June 9th, 2021 Posted by Jim Thacker

Master procedural shading in Houdini and Arnold


The Gnomon Workshop has released Procedural Shading Techniques for Houdini & Arnold: a guide to creating photrealistic procedural shaders recorded by environment artist Wojtek Piwowarczyk.

The workshop, which comprises 8.5 hours of video training on shading and look development for visual effects work, also covers related techniques in ZBrush and Photoshop.

Discover multiple techniques for creating photorealistic procedural shaders in Houdini
During the workshop, Piwowarczyk reveals his personal techiques for creating realistic shaders, developed during years working on visual effects for a range of movie, broadcast and games projects.

The training sets out several different methods for extracting information from source geometry to create effective procedural shaders that can be applied to any model, or saved for reuse on future projects.

As well as specific Houdini techniques, he aims to provide viewers with a solid understanding of procedural shading and look development for surfaces, including methods that can be applied to other software.

In addition to the tutorial videos themselves, viewers can download the final Houdini scene, plus 3D models, ZBrush files, baked displacement textures, and proxies for the Megascans textures used.

About the artist
Wojtek Piwowarczyk is an environment artist working in film, television, and game cinematics, and has over 10 years of experience across multiple disciplines.

He has worked for companies including MPC, Axis Animation and DNEG with his most recent credits including The Mandalorian, The Lion King and Love, Death & Robots.

Pricing and availability
Procedural Shading Techniques for Houdini & Arnold is available via an online subscription to The Gnomon Workshop. Subscriptions cost $49/month or $490/year. You can try the training for free.

Read more about Procedural Shading Techniques for Houdini & Arnold


Full disclosure: CG Channel is owned by Gnomon.